While today's media services and devices are becoming increasingly complex, the implementation of personalization technologies has lagged. Mobile phones, computers, digital media players and other service-ready media devices are currently access points to an increasingly diverse set of services. The assignment of personal identity and preferences for these devices, however, is conventionally performed via, and stored on a chip within, each device. In the example of a GSM mobile phone, these chips may be removable, but only by disassembling the phone. In many other devices, the identity or preferences as stored within the device are unavailable to the user except through the device. This means that the device has information about the user that is associated only with that device.